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Despite the critical role of the policy environment in facilitating the advancement of building information modeling (BIM) as a systemic innovation to reshape traditional facility design, construction and operation processes, scant scholarly attention has been paid to systematically investigating how and why complex BIM policies are concretely and gradually implemented in different regional contexts from a dynamic policy diffusion perspective. This study aims to empirically investigate how different types of BIM policy instruments are dynamically implemented in heterogeneous regions over time and how the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions is comprehensively impacted by both internal efficiency needs and external legitimacy pressures.

This study employed a positivist research paradigm in which BIM policy data from 182 prefecture-level and above cities in China during 2011–2022 were analyzed with quantitative approaches for theory verification. Based on the content analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of the adopted BIM policy instruments in heterogeneous regions over time, the event history analysis (EHA) method was then used to further examine the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of BIM policies across different regions.

The content analysis results show that while environmental instruments (such as technological integration and goal planning) are the primary policy instruments currently adopted in China, recent years have also witnessed increasing adoptions of supply-side instruments (such as fiscal support and information support) and demand-side instruments (such as demonstration projects and tax incentives). After controlling for the impacts of regional fiscal and technical resources, the EHA results illustrate that BIM policy adoption positively relates to regional construction industry scale but negatively relates to regional industry productivity and that compared with public pressures from industry participants, vertical pressures from the central government and horizontal pressures from neighboring regions are more substantial drivers for policy adoption.

As an exploratory effort of using a dynamic policy diffusion perspective to systematically investigate how BIM policies are adopted in heterogeneous regional contexts to facilitate BIM advancement, this study not only characterizes the complexity and dynamics of BIM policies but also provides deepened understandings of the mechanisms underlying policy adoption in the conservative construction industry. The findings hold implications for how multifarious policy instruments can be more effectively and dynamically adopted to facilitate the advancement of BIM and related technologies as innovative solutions in the construction domain.

This study aims to explore how project-based firms, which generally organize most of their work around temporary projects in discontinuous and fragmented types of business contexts, proactively formulate and implement digital transformation strategies under institutional pressures in a predigital era.

An exploratory case study was conducted in a large-scale construction company in China using multiple data collection methods, including semistructured interviews, documentation collection and observation.

An integrated framework is developed to conceptualize three key dimensions of digital transformation strategies of project-based firms: strategic adaptation for organization-environment fit through balancing the internal efficiency needs with the external legitimacy pressures; proactive business transformation through comprehensively managing the roles of digital technologies in optimizing defined business processes and fostering new business models; and delicate organizational transformation to integrate temporary project-level operation processes with ongoing firm-level business processes.

This study represents an exploratory effort to empirically investigate how project-based firms strategically organize complex digital transformation imperatives in their discontinuous and fragmented business contexts. The findings contribute to deepened understandings of how complex organizational and environmental contexts can be comprehensively managed for systemic business and organizational transformations to leverage the value of emerging digital technologies for project-based organizations.

Despite its great potential to improve the sustainability of architectural, engineering, construction and facility management activities, the implementation of building information modeling (BIM) in many projects has failed to achieve expected benefits due to negative behavioral responses such as user resistance. This paper aims to characterize the complexity of end user's behavioral responses to BIM implementation in construction projects using a multidimensional perspective and examines how these responses are impacted by different levels of contextual factors.

By integrating technology acceptance, resistance and adoption literature, this paper theoretically proposes a research model to characterize the associations between different dimensions of behavioral responses and different levels of contextual factors. The model is then empirically tested with survey and interview data collected from BIM-based construction projects in China.

The empirical results not only validate the two-dimensional view of the behavioral responses (i.e. the dimension of support/resistance that ranges from aggressive resistance to enthusiastic support, and the dimension of actual use that ranges from non-use to high use) but also provide evidence for the prevalence of ambivalent responses such as supporting but lowly using and resisting but highly using. The empirical results also provide evidence that different levels of contextual factors generally play different roles in shaping the behavioral responses. Specifically, the dimension of support/resistance is more substantially impacted by the team-level factor while the dimension of actual use of BIM is more significantly associated with the project-level factor.

While previous research on BIM adoption or implementation behaviors has primarily focused on investigating users' response from single-dimension perspectives such as acceptance or non-acceptance, this study represents an exploratory effort of using a two-dimensional view to characterize the complexity and ambivalence of end users' behavioral responses to the implementation of innovative technologies such as BIM in construction projects. This study also contributes to deepened understandings of how these different dimensions of behavioral responses are intricately shaped by different levels (i.e. individual-, team- and project-levels) of contextual factors in construction projects which are characterized as temporary and inter-organizational.

Within the labor-intensive construction industry characterized by distinctly structural shortages in the labor force worldwide, efficient and effective migration of construction workers across regions is critical for the smooth operation of construction activities. This study aims to investigate how the interregional migration patterns of construction workers are impacted by the disparities in both employment opportunities and environment amenities between the origin and destination provinces.

Drawing on the push and pull theory and the archival data on 13,728 migrant construction workers in China, descriptive analyses are first performed to characterize the interregional migration patterns of the investigated construction workers. Combining regional data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, this study uses hierarchical regression modeling techniques to empirically test the relative importance of the employment-related and environment-related factors in driving the interregional migration of construction workers after controlling for the effects of related economic and geographic factors.

The results provide evidence that the interregional migration of construction workers is principally driven by the disparities in employment opportunities while disparities in environment amenities (including climate comfort disparity, medical service disparity and educational service disparity) generally play much fewer substantive roles. With regard to the impacts of employment opportunities, the results provide evidence that compared with the disparity in job market size, the disparities in job income and industry development level are more significantly relevant factors, which positively pull and adversely push the interregional migration flows, respectively.

This study contributes to a deepened understanding of how workers specifically balance their employment and amenity needs to make temporary migration decisions in the “laggard” labor-intensive construction industry. This study also adds to the literature on population migration by characterizing the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of the workers' migration activities. The findings hold important practical implications for construction organizations and policymakers for effectively managing the mobility of migrant construction workers.

The extant literature on migrant construction workers has primarily focused on the consequences of international migration and the generalization of empirical findings on population migration mechanisms in other domains to the construction industry is substantially limited by the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of their migration activities. In addressing this gap, this study represents an exploratory effort to quantitatively characterize the interregional migration patterns of construction workers in the labor-intensive construction industry and examines the roles of employment opportunity and environmental amenity in driving interregional migration.

As the foundation of social and economic development, infrastructure development projects are characterized by large initial investment, high technical requirements and thus generally delivered through complex contractor–subcontractor collaboration chains. This study aims to characterize the complexity of collaborative networks between contractors and subcontractors for infrastructure development through comparing the structural characteristics and the formation mechanisms of contractor–subcontractor collaborative networks for the following two different types of infrastructure: public works (PWCN) owned and operated by government agencies, and public utilities (PUCN) owned and operated by nongovernment agencies.

Based on the method of stochastic actor-oriented models and the longitudinal dataset of National Quality Award Projects in China during 2001–2020, this study compares how the structural characteristics of project-based collaborative networks between contractors and subcontractors for the two types of projects are different and how related micro-mechanisms, including both structure-based endogenous network effects and attribute-based exogenous homophily effects (institutional, organizational and geographical homophily), collectively underpin the formation of the networks.

The empirical results provide evidence that while the two networks are both characterized by relatively low levels of network density, PWCN is more globally connected around a minority of superconnected contractors as compared with PUCN. The results further reveal that compared with PUCN, the formation of PWCN is more significantly related to the structure-based anti in-isolates effect, suggesting that PWCN is more open for new entrant subcontractors. With regard to the attribute-based homophily effects, the results provide evidence that while both significantly and positively related to the effects of organizational (same company group) and geographical homophily (same location), the formation of PWCN and PUCN is oppositely driven by the institutional homophily effect (same ownership type).

As an exploratory effort of using network perspective to investigate the formation mechanisms of contractor–subcontractor relationships in the infrastructure development domain, this study contributes to a network and self-organizing system view of how contractors select subcontractors in different types of infrastructure projects. The study also provides insights into how contractor–subcontractor collaborative relationships can be better manipulated to promote the development of complex infrastructure in different contexts.

Due to the lack of industrywide data, now there is only perceptual knowledge, through survey data, that construction firms may face great challenges in geographical diversification. The article aims to provide an objective description on the state of interregional market entry practices in the Chinese construction industry. How these practices are influenced by related set of regional and industry-related factors is further studied.

Description analysis of the practices is first performed based on a first-hand industrial data set including 1,020 projects and 404 construction firms. Combining provincial panel data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, related regional and industry-related factors on these practices are further analyzed through hierarchical regression models.

(1) Interregional market entry practices are not quite prevalent during the past two decades, only involving 271 projects and 111 firms which accounts for 26.57% and 27.47% of the analyzed subjects respectively; (2) Large, state-owned and experienced firms are more frequently involved in the practices; (3) A number of regional factors such as local market protection and industry scale also significantly impact the practices.

The empirical analysis of this study was conducted using the specific dataset from the National Quality Award Projects where firms tend to be national, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to the whole industry contexts.

While most of the research on market entry practices in the project-based construction industry is undertaken at project or firm level based on survey data, this research represents an exploratory effort of using objective data to provide a macro overview of the practices at the industry level. The findings could contribute to a deepened understanding of how these practices are impacted by related regional- and industry-level factors.

Few of the established risk identification methods refer to low-severity yet high-frequency safety risks data that may lead to several safety risks being ignored, thus reducing the potential of learning from a considerable number of cases. The purpose of this study is to explore a new valid method based on preaccident safety supervision data to identify these minor construction safety risks during routine construction operations.

A total of 329 official construction safety supervision reports containing 5,159 safety problem records from Shanghai between 2016 and 2018 served as raw material for in-depth analysis. Given the characteristics of the data collected, text mining integrated with natural language processing was applied to review the supervision reports and group safety risks automatically.

This study clarifies the way in which the supervision data should be employed to analyze high-frequency–low-severity safety risks. From these data, seven unsafe-act-related and nine unsafe-condition-related risks are identified. Regarding unsafe-act-related risks, inappropriate human behaviors could usually occur in personnel management, contract management, expense management, material management and acceptance work. For unsafe-condition-related risks, hoisting, scaffolding and reinforcement works are the main generators of onsite safety hazards during construction operations.

The study includes implications for project managers and supervisors to facilitate more effective proactive risk management by paying more attention to collecting and employing the supervision data established in each routine inspection.

Whereas previous research focused on analyzing severe accidents, this study seeks to identify the high-frequency–low-severity construction safety risks using the preaccident supervision data. The findings could provide a new thought and research direction for construction safety risk management.

With the increasing attention acquired from researchers and practitioners in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, building information modeling (BIM) has fundamentally changed the approach we design, construct and delivery, as well as operate and maintenance of buildings and civil infrastructures. This study tries to provide an innovative perspective on BIM research. This study aims to analyze the necessity and feasibility of BIM user satisfaction research and define what BIM user satisfaction is, and then to develop a quantitative method for the measurement of BIM user satisfaction.

As it is indicated in the content, BIM user satisfaction is measured by the sum of the user's weighted reactions to a set of factors. To be specific, the entropy method was adopted to calculate the “weighting” of the factors, and the triangular fuzzy number (TFN) method was selected to compute the “scoring” of the factors. Through the literature review, methodology and tool development, as well as case study and discussions, this paper was generated sequentially.

This study found that the proposed tool for the measurement of BIM success is valid and reliable; it formerly translated the conceptual definition of BIM user satisfaction into an accurate measurement instrument. It also indicated that many factors are affecting the BIM users' satisfaction, and each of the factors inherited various importance and score, and the findings are expected to improve the performance and effectiveness of BIM management.

Through the translation of the conceptual BIM user satisfaction into a valid quantitative measurement instrument, this research provides an excellent framework for the management of BIM from the user's perspective, and it could help to stimulate user's acceptance of BIM in the AEC industry in future.

The assembly quality of complex products is pivotal to their lifecycle performance. Assembly precision analysis (APA) is an effective method used to check the feasibility and quality of assembly. However, there is still a need for a systematic approach to be developed for APA of kinematic mechanisms. To achieve more accurate analysis of kinematic assembly, this paper aims to propose a precision analysis method based on equivalence of the deviation source.

A unified deviation vector representation model is adopted by considering dimension deviation, geometric deviation, joint clearance and assembly deformation. Then, vector loops and vector equations are constructed, according to joint type and deviation propagation path. A combined method, using deviation accumulation and sensitivity modeling, is applied to solve the kinematic APA of complex products.

When using the presented method, geometric form deviation, joint clearance and assembly deformation are considered selectively during tolerance modeling. In particular, the proposed virtual link model and its orientation angle are developed to determine joint deviation. Finally, vector loops and vector equations are modeled to express deviation accumulation.

The proposed method provides a new means for the APA of complex products, considering joint clearance and assembly deformation while improving the accuracy of APA, as much as possible.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of cumulative rainfall deficit (CRD) indices for corn in Shandong Province, China, based on high-resolution weather (county, 1980-2011) and yield data (township, 1989-2010) for five counties in Tai’an prefecture.

A survey with farming households is undertaken to obtain local corn prices and production costs to compute the sum insured. CRD indices are developed for five corn-growth phases. Rainfall is spatially interpolated to derive indices for areas that are outside a 25 km radius from weather stations. To lower basis risk, triggers and exits of the payout functions are statistically determined rather than relying on water requirement levels.

The results show that rainfall deficits in the main corn-growth phases explain yield reductions to a satisfying degree, except for the emergence phase. Correlation coefficients between payouts of the CRD indices and yield reductions reach 0.86-0.96 and underline the performance of the indices with low basis risk. The exception is SA-Xintai (correlation 0.71) where a total rainfall deficit index performs better (0.87). Risk premium rates range from 5.6 percent (Daiyue) to 12.2 percent (SA-Xintai) and adequately reflect the drought risk.

This paper suggests that rainfall deficit indices can be used in the future to complement existing indemnity-based insurance products that do not cover drought for corn in Shandong or for CRD indices to operate as a new insurance product.